Eimear McBride Wins Baileys Prize

Sam Baker on the winner of this year's Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction

"In a terrible week for women around the world, one place where women are thriving and winning is in writing," so said Helen Fraser, chair of judges, at the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction last night.

I have to admit, I wasn't wholly convinced. And then she awarded the £30,000 prize - not to blockbusting Pulitzer Prize winner and favourite Donna Tartt, but to debut novelist Eimear McBride, for her experimental debut novel A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing. And I (and, given the collective gasp of surprise and spontaneous cheers that broke out around the room), became a convert.

"I hope it will serve as an incentive to publishers to look at difficult books and think again," said McBride, whose pitch-perfect acceptance speech doubled as a clarion call to publishers and writers alike to grow a pair. "To be a woman is a very fearless thing these days," she finished. And she should know. Her book was rejected by dozens of agents and publishers before finding a home at tiny experimental publisher Galley Beggar. (It's since been published in paperback by Faber.) And there she was, on the stage in front of the great and the good of the publishing industry, the embodiment of fearless.

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Described as "An amazing and ambitious first novel that impressed the judges with its inventiveness and energy. This is an extraordinary new voice – this novel will move and astonish the reader," McBride's novel is no easy read. A wonderful but harrowing first person stream of consciousness told from the point of view (some of it in the womb) of a young woman whose brother has a brain tumour, but it truly is one of the most extraordinary things I've read in the last year.

Eimear McBride wasn't the only winner last night. Baileys - whose sponsorship of the women's prize was met with a degree of cynicism when it was announced last year - turned out to be the perfect fit: a fact personified by the brilliant (and VERY unsponsorlike speech) in which Syl Saller of Diageo lauded her librarian aunt Mary for her role in shaping her. And, of course, Kate Mosse, whose genius has ensured the Women's Prize, now in its nineteenth year, has emerged phoenix-like from the ashes of Orange, bigger and more fabulous than ever.

Here's a reminder of the rest of the shortlist, all of which are worthy of a place on your summer reading list:

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